A student from Astronaut High School wrote brief, disturbing messages in his plot to attack the school, telling his friend "get down when I say run," "I really want to kill" and "murder everyone wait till cops come kill them and hold out."

The two students exchanged messages for months about targeting black and Latino students, necrophilia and cannibalism, and crafting bombs and getting their hands on guns in order to unleash "Columbine 2.0," transcripts show.

nobheadmate: Were u want to meet

lifeofparadise: Double doors in front of gym, by student services

nobheadmate: Ok

lifeofparadise: From there we can pick victims

They conspired over the anonymous app Kik, a little-known smartphone app that allows users to send messages without using their phone numbers. Some students are using these types of anonymous smartphone apps to threaten their schools, posing a challenge for parents and police who know little about them.

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Kik(Photo: FLORIDA TODAY)

Detectives from the Titusville Police Department and the FBI's Joint Terrorism Task Force discovered the messages in a Kik group chat called "Who's Ready to Die" after a teacher's spouse told police that a student at Astronaut High had been making comments about stabbing his classmates, hiding bombs in the school and killing his art teacher.

Police records of the conversations show that the student in question was sending violent and suicidal messages to at least seven other Kik users, but none of them reported the behavior. Kik, whose headquarters are in Ontario, Canada, did not report the behavior, either.

Apps like Kik allow users to chat under the disguise of a user name. There are other apps including Sarahah, BurnBook and Whisper where users can send messages anonymously, and more well-known apps such as Instagram and Snapchat where users can send photos and videos that are deleted as soon as the recipient views them.

The rise in popularity of these smartphone apps is posing a challenge for parents unaware of these programs, as well as law enforcement officers responding to instances of threats of suicide, cyber-bullying, sharing sexually explicit content and school threats.

Harder to track

Detectives were easily able to search the Astronaut High School student's phone, where they found months' worth of messages about his intent to attack the school, only because he unlocked the phone and told them the passwords for all the apps. In fact, the student asked detectives if they wanted to search him.

Without the student's cooperation, the investigation likely would have taken much longer for police to subpoena the company and try endless combinations of numbers to unlock his phone.

"There are so many apps out there now. It is tougher," said Tod Goodyear, who helped start the Brevard County Sheriff's Office's cybercrimes unit. "A lot of the apps are geared toward not leaving information behind." In cases where the sheriff's office can't crack a device, he said, the case is usually elevated to federal agencies.

On apps that promise anonymity, there are layers of encryption so that only the people sending and receiving the messages can see them, said Tom Eskridge, a computer science associate professor at Florida Institute of Technology. In many cases, even if the messages are somehow intercepted as they make their way across internet providers or phone lines, they can't be read by anyone outside the sender and the recipient.

If the software behind the app is secure enough, "even the company that hosts your messages wouldn't be able to decrypt them," Eskridge said.

On its website, Kik claims it does not have access to the messages users send over the app, and photos are automatically deleted soon after they're sent. Parents can only view their kid's messages on their kid's phone, and can only see so far back in their messaging history.

A screenshot of the social networking app Sarahah.(Photo: Sarahah)

Sarahah, another app that lets users send anonymous messages and has also been criticized for creating an environment for cyberbullying, employs servers all over the world, making it nearly impossible to track where they're coming from. It's been removed from the Apple and Google app stores.

In December 2017, elementary schools in Palm Bay and West Melbourne received a threat via Sarahah that "a massacre is coming. I have planned this for two years staying in this hellhole."

Police never determined who sent the threat, but, after speaking with students at the schools, concluded it was a hoax.

Although anonymous apps have made it more difficult to track down potential suspects, Goodyear said it isn't impossible, as most apps leave behind some sort of trail and companies are often cooperative with investigations.

In March this year, just a few days after the shooting in Parkland, a photo circulated on Instagram of a masked boy holding a gun with the caption "I'm coming space coast watch out," prompting an investigation and mass absences at Space Coast Jr./Sr. High School in Port St. John. The person who posted the picture employed the user name "brevardshooter."

Still, police were able to quickly track down the 14-year-old girl behind it.

"They think they have anonymity because they can hide behind a screen name or hide behind a Twitter handle," Goodyear said. "There are ways to figure out who you are."

Karen North, a professor of digital social media at the University of Southern California, said that desire to communicate anonymously has existed "since the beginning of the internet."

Chat rooms to talk about sex, niche hobbies and taboo subjects can have a positive impact on people if they're used the right way. However, North added, apps that promise anonymity also invite inappropriate behavior that companies need to make sure they're monitoring.

The ability to communicate anonymously, she added, has an effect on the way people act. It's why kids used to call in bomb threats to their school from a pay phone to get out of a test, or why people from the security of their keyboard get into name-calling matches on a Facebook thread.

"Nobody who has the resources to create a viable anonymous app these days does so without knowing there will be naked pictures, malicious content and probably announcements of illegal intentions," she said. "With anonymous apps, if you leave them alone, you're going to get an entire app filled with pornography, hate speech and cyber bullying."

A generational gap

A new survey by the University of Chicago found that Instagram and Snapchat are the most popular social media apps among American teenagers, and about 40 percent of teens use anonymous apps like Kik and Sarahah. Adults, meanwhile, might not even know they exist.

Adults are learning how to use their smartphones and social media from their kids and just now getting the hang of Facebook, an app that more and more teenagers are logging out of. In January, only 6.8 million of Facebook's 214 million users nationwide were under the age of 17, compared to 13 million in 2011.

North likened these little-known apps to a cool underground nightclub or the neighborhood fort in the woods. Kids don't want adults to know about them, and, likewise, adults don't have much desire to be there.

"A couple cool kids find it and tell more cool kids, and then the nightclub becomes a popular place to show up. These things spread by word of mouth, and that's been true since before there were apps," North said. "What's worse than the uncool kids finding your nightclub? It's your parents finding your nightclub. Facebook has become the nightclub that parents and adults show up to."

Parents aren't on these popular apps, but they still want to monitor their children's activity on them, especially in light of the Parkland shooting that's prompted copycat threats across the country, an uptick in teen suicides in Brevard County and the app's inherent draw for bullies and child predators.

"As long as we are paying the phone and internet bill, the devices are ours not theirs, and they are not entitled to the same level of privacy they would have if they were paying the bill," said Dan Goldblatt, a parent from Titusville.

In a FLORIDA TODAY Facebook crowdsourcing survey, some parents said their kids are only allowed to own old-school flip phones, that they use apps to see what their kids are doing on their phones and that they routinely inspect their kids' devices. Some use "mirroring" programs to monitor what their kids are doing on their phones, block certain websites and apps, and even track their kids' locations.

"I'll search their rooms, go through their pockets, their backpacks, book bags, purses, phones, iPads, whatever," said Georgie Bears. "You live in my house, you follow my rules. They can be as mad as they want, as long as they're safe and mad."

Caroline Glenn is the Education Reporter at FLORIDA TODAY. Contact her at caglenn@floridatoday.com or 321-576-5933, or follow her on Twitter @bycarolineglenn and like "Education at Florida Today" on Facebook.